[milhous]

I'm curious if there's any effort underway to refine Ubuntu's desktop UI. It's a great distro for my needs, but am always underwhelmed by the UI and how large all the buttons and elements are, plus it's use of earth tone color schemes. I feel it could do a much better job using a screen's real estate.

Doesn't even have to like Windows or OS X. Perhaps something like Material Design would be a good starting point.

Dare I say that a refined, well-polished UI for Linux would provide a great face and mainstream credibility to adopting Open Source computing.

[T-A]

Sure, it's called Kubuntu: http://www.kubuntu.org/ ;)

[karmakaze]

I would say Xubuntu. But.. I just tried the 15.04 and it's visually less polished than previous ones, presumably due to Xfce 4.12 defaults. It also seemed more sluggish (perhaps a strong word for the experience). It was certainly perceptible. I'm at odds, Xfce was my 'go to'. Any recommendations? Perhaps a non-Unity Gnome.

[georgerobinson]

I'm running Ubuntu 15.04 with GNOME Session Flashback: a sort of GNOME 2 for GTK3. It's Ubuntu how it used to be, but with the latest upstream features. I've been using it for about 2 months after I moved back from Arch. It's stable and fast, so everything I want from a desktop environment. However, as you point out, the UI is still quite big, even on mid-resolution displays (1600x900).